I used Orkut in the early days (from 2004 - 2008). The growth trajectory was similar to facebook. All the elite colleges in India were using it in the beginning and then it rapidly spread across other colleges.
But the thing was:
1. There was no News feed. You had to actually visit your friend's wall to make a comment/see what they were up-to.
2. That other person would know the next day that you visited their profile. This discourages people from taking interest in the lives of others. You didn't want to come across as a creep or having nothing better to do with your time.
3. Communities/Forums were a big thing. There wasn't too much to do so you visited "communities". It became a turf war between Indians, Brazilians and a few other countries over content. So if you were from another country, you would get the feeling of not belonging here. I always thought that it drove people from other countries away.
4. Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you. Discussions on forums/pages were not a high priority. News feed was the game changer. I remember people moving away en masse from Orkut to Facebook around 2007 - 08.
It's funny about #1, since when the NewsFeed appeared on Facebook most people were mad about the change. It was a weird thing going from assuming that only people who viewed your profile (e.g. enough to care) would see your goofy pics, and then now they were splashed in front of anyone you added as a 'friend'.
Maybe most people who were vocal about the change were mad, while the rest of us happily used it. I do remember how jarring the change felt, but it quickly become obvious what a new and useful experience it was.
Presumably it would display the same "There's no news; you should add some more friends!" message you get when you've first signed up and skipped the friend-recommendation step.
A combination of NoScript and / or RequestPolicy works best for this. No need to rely on software that sometimes doesn't truly block all advertisements.
Don't forget FB Apps. The idea that social graph could be viewed as a data platform was revolutionary. I remember lot of young engineers around me going crazy about it and building silly apps. There were a lot of useful apps as well; book lending, used articles sales and so on.
Orkut, MySpace, Ning and other social networks had support for apps using OpenSocial around 2008. You had access to friends, FoFs, and several other social features.
For some time people ignored this platform, which meant that you could make a few million dollars per month porting successful FB games (Colheita Feliz, a FarmVille clone, comes to mind) since you faced virtually no competition.
Indian here. One of the biggest problems with Orkut was spam. They did nothing to combat the countless unsolicited "fraandship" requests. A lot of women I know abandoned Orkut early due to the harrassment.
As someone whose social media life began after Orkut was pretty much dead, I've been wondering about the origins of the word 'fraandship' for a while now. So it goes back to Orkut, at least. Hmm..
That is a problem with Facebook too, I know a lot of women get many unsolicited friendship requests.
I guess it will be a problem with any social network for that matter. Unless you get a totally protected account, like you are invisible to everyone else, except those with whom you want to be friends.
But then for a such thing, email and Whatsapp groups work just fine.
I wonder what the gender-split is? I've received numerous friend-requests on facebook from "Hot teenagers", often with messages professing their undying love for me.
I've just mentally filed them away as romance-scams, rather than harassment..
Because the "harassing" friend requests males receive are from obvious spam accounts with dumb, generic names, while females receive "ur hot" from legitimate accounts at what is likely a much higher rate.
Facebook shows page owners metrics like that. 46% of Facebook is "female", while 54% is male. They don't show an "other" option in the admin section, though I think they have that option in profile settings.
Another big factor for the communities' explosion was their misuse. The way communities were displayed in your profile page leaked enough metadata that people started using them as badges instead. Some time around 2006 people started creating communities with nonsense names, and it was not unusual to see people with hundreds of them on their profile. Things like "I cry everytime I see Mufasa die" or "Nobody expects the spanish inquisition" were the kinds of titles used in order to display your sense of humor.
In some sense this is akin to Tumblr's hashtags we see today, in which people abused the metadata channel to convey real meaning.
Well, qq space is more like an half-heartened adventure from Tecent. By its nature, it is in conflict with QQ the IM. And with success on the IM side, there is no growing space for qq space. It's never being updated fundamentally since its introduction.
So I guess the problem is that Tecent made the strategic decision to not pursue the social area in the same way as FB; and this is a good decision.
But the thing was:
1. There was no News feed. You had to actually visit your friend's wall to make a comment/see what they were up-to.
2. That other person would know the next day that you visited their profile. This discourages people from taking interest in the lives of others. You didn't want to come across as a creep or having nothing better to do with your time.
3. Communities/Forums were a big thing. There wasn't too much to do so you visited "communities". It became a turf war between Indians, Brazilians and a few other countries over content. So if you were from another country, you would get the feeling of not belonging here. I always thought that it drove people from other countries away.
4. Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you. Discussions on forums/pages were not a high priority. News feed was the game changer. I remember people moving away en masse from Orkut to Facebook around 2007 - 08.